Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Why is it that the commons is so often excluded from official policy discussions about how to manage resources and improve people’s lives? This strikes me as a serious void in our public conversations, one that we desperately need to correct.
Food has become – to use an older phrase now being recycled by contemporary activists – the “edible dynamic” at the heart of mainstream economic and environmentalist debates.
Montpelier resident Jane Dwinell has followed the method in Your Money or Your Life to live frugally and retire in her mid-fifties. She celebrates and elaborates on the method in her new book, Freedom through Frugality. Annie McCleary is coordinator for Transition Town Montpelier, part of the worldwide Transition movement, which helps Vermonters take control of their food, energy, and other resources, while moving from oil dependence to community resilience.
How do you tell a downstory? Downstories are hard to find in our culture. There are plenty of upstories that don’t work out that act like scary cautionary tales (if you don’t make it to the ball, you never get out of that fireplace and will always wear rags). But how do you go about telling the story of Transition, of the energy descent we have to make as individuals and as a people? How do you turn the coach back into a pumpkin and the princess back into someone who can tend a fire?
Regardless of the industry, "Most companies tend to use the same standard systems and more and more companies arrive at a situation where time and cost have been reduced to a minimum." It is bitterly ironic that so much success could lead to an ultimate failure to find further paths toward innovation and earnings.
But one thing is for sure. The malfunctioning at the nuclear plant is but one of the bites out of life stemming from the human failure to recognize, much less plan for, the high price and growing risks of economic growth.
Many responses to peak oil urge individual and community solutions, ignoring government. They argue that since government hasn’t done anything to address the problem, citizens and businesses must take matters into their own hands. Some even argue that government is part of the problem, particularly federal and state governments. This attitude is shortsighted.
How we think about climate destabilization has a great deal to do with how we talk about it. For example, we do not face merely a “warming” of the Earth, but rather a worsening destabilization of, well, almost everything. We are rapidly making a different and less hospitable planet, one that Bill McKibben calls “Eaarth.”
Today, cities face substantial barriers to effective water management due to the sheer extent of non-permeable surfaces such as pavement and concrete. During rain events, the main function of these impervious surfaces is to concentrate and dispose of water as quickly as it arrives, sending it to storm sewers where it inevitably ends up in creeks, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Not only is this poor water management, but unfiltered water can cause major damage to ecosystems!
-International Conference on Global Land Grabbing
-Coalition Government ‘must step up to the plate on sustainable food’
-Subsidies and the “True Cost of Food”
-Kenyans fear Dakatcha Woodlands biofuel expansion
-Who feeds Bristol? Towards a resilient food plan
-Huber warns EU president of glyphosate danger to livestock and plant
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Conflict in the Middle East
-Japan
-Obama’s Energy Plan
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
These days, spiritual understandings of “simple living” go to great lengths to evade discussions of finance, thus perpetuating an environment where “living simply” requires “spending amply.”
